Lompoc, California, USA. Thanks for stopping by!
So, we rise from the rubble...
Friday, December 15, 2023
Dan, I Allegedly, "The Fire Alarm is Going Off in the Economy"
Dan, I Allegedly, 12/15/23
"The Fire Alarm is Going Off in the Economy"
"Jeffrey Gundlach, the Bond king is telling us that there is a fire alarm that is about to go off in our economy. You’re going to see banks, get crashed, and the stock market collapse. Plus you have to prepare for power outages. New York City just had a power outage. Are you ready?"
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Bill Bonner, "Pivot Fervor"
"Pivot Fervor"
Plus, mounting corruption, armored cars,
DoD 'program increases' and the road to Buenos Aires...
by Bill Bonner
Baltimore, Maryland - "A curious ad appeared on our computer screen this morning: “Armored cars…don’t wait.” An armored car was not something we thought we needed. Is there something we’re missing? Gun sales have been strong for several years. Dan tells us that there are now 125 guns for every 100 men, women, and children in the country. Maybe we need an armored car too…to protect us from guns! And hand grenades. The ad shows a Mercedes 4x4 surviving a bomb attack.
As Argentine economics minister, Luis Caputo, reminds us, the real problem of a wayward, crisis ridden, hyperinflation-bound government is not the choice of personal pronouns, nor funding ‘gender affirming’ surgery, nor even its immigration policies. Instead, it’s the government’s “addiction to fiscal deficits.” Whether it wastes money on welfare or war, weasley misfits or parasitic cronies…doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it spends more than it can afford. Over time, the deficits mount up. The debt from the past drags on the here-and-now spending. Corruption increases. Lawlessness too.
Argentina owes $400 billion it can’t pay. The US owes $34 trillion that it can’t pay either.
“Pivot Fervor”: Inflate or Die, is the choice that confronts them both. Either they continue funding the make-believe economy with more make-believe money. Or watch it die. That’s what this week’s ‘pivot fervor’ is all about; Wall Street expects the Fed to inflate. (And it’s probably right.)
The gauchos are way ahead of us. Inflation is the easier choice for policymakers, with deficits and money-printing, rather than tough budget cuts. But the Argentines have seen what it can do. They’ve watched as it has turned the economy into a nightmare of soaring prices, chaotic exchange rates and financial ‘mistakes’ that undermined the nation’s prosperity and destroyed its middle classes.
Inflation rose over 50% in 1973…and then over 700% in 1976. Between 1974-1983, Argentina’s malcontents – mostly Marxist dreamers – kidnapped rich people…robbed banks…and fought pitched battles with the police and the army. That was when you needed an armored car. Then, a coup d’etat, led by law-and-order generals, in 1976, brought with it a wave of violence against leftist activists, students, and more than a few completely innocent by-standers. As many as 30,000 people are said to have been ‘disappeared,’ with many of their bodies dropped into the ocean.
The generals tried to distract the public by starting a war with Britain, over the Falkland Islands. They were humiliated, lost power and, years after, put on trial. The Junta leader, Jorge Rafael Videla, died in prison many years later.
And now, after 70 years of addiction to deficits, Argentina has entered rehab. Javier Milei aims to kick the habit of overspending. He says he will force the nation to go ‘cold turkey’…not just letting the bubble economy deflate, but cutting it to pieces himself.
Guns Out: The US is not even close. No one worries about fiscal deficits in the US. Already, the federal deficit is headed for $2 trillion for 2024. Do the newspapers shout the alarm? Do the influencers – from the pulpits and podcasts – warn Americans that they had better change course? Do the politicians panic…and rev up the chainsaws?
Nah. They give more money to the gun-makers. ResponsibleStatecraft.org: "Congress stuffs $25 billion into Pentagon contractor stockings." It would seem little elves have added over 1,200 'program increases' to the DoD budget for 2024." It’s that time of year, and despite all the budgetary drama unfolding on Capitol Hill, lawmakers have already finished most of their holiday shopping for their favorite children: Pentagon contractors. Through cryptic “program increases” to the defense budget appropriations for fiscal year 2024, most with no listed author and little to no justification, Congress has added more than $25 billion to the Pentagon’s procurement and research accounts for fiscal year 2024.
In private life, mistakes are corrected – swiftly. Find out for yourself. Tell your wife how much you like her new dress… ‘because it doesn’t make her look so fat.’ Or take all your savings to Las Vegas and ‘invest’ them by playing the slots. Then, on the drive home…be sure to give the finger to guys in big pickups.
Unfit for Office: But chainsaws don’t often work where they are most needed – in the public sector. In America today, there are two million people in jail…and another 3 million ‘under supervision’ by the criminal justice system. But not a single one of them is there because he started a deadly war…wasted millions of the public’s money…or lied to the voters. You can work for Amtrak…or the War on Drugs…spending billions of dollars with nothing to show for it, year after year…and still expect a budget increase next year. You can sit in Congress and vote for every misbegotten, woeful, wasteful piece of legislative claptrap that comes down the pike…and you still might be elected president.
The half-life of the average business start-up is only about three years. Half of all new businesses are history before year number 5. But the half-life of a law, a regulation, an agency, a department…etc…is forever. Or until a revolution, war, hyperinflation, or other calamity blows up the whole system.
This is more than a harmless feature of government. It is the reason governments are such a drag on human progress…and why, if they can get away with it, they create bigger and bigger problems. This is also our guess – very grosso modo – about ‘what went wrong’ in that dreadful 40-year stretch, from 1980 to 2020. And it’s why the market for armored cars may get better."
"12 Big Restaurants Are Being Wiped Out Completely"
Full screen recommended.
The Atlantis Report, 12/15/23
"12 Big Restaurants Are Being Wiped Out Completely"
"The restaurant industry is no stranger to challenges, and as we step into 2024, several major restaurant chains find themselves in precarious positions. Factors such as changing consumer preferences, economic uncertainties, and the aftermath of global events have left these establishments grappling with financial difficulties and declining popularity. Here are 12 major restaurant chains that are currently facing big trouble."
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"The Great Thing About The Internet..."
"The great thing about the internet is that you get to meet people you
would otherwise only meet if you were committed to the same asylum."
- Robert Brault
- Robert Brault
"The Good News? It’s Up To You"
"The Good News? It’s Up To You"
by John Wilder
“Winners always want the ball when the game is on the line.”
– "The Replacements"
"One of the freeing things about what’s going on in the world right now, especially with respect to the current breakdown of American (and perhaps Global) society is the fact that many are coming to one of the biggest realizations they’ll ever have: most people don’t care about us, and there’s probably no one that’s going to come and save us.
I remember the first time I came to that conclusion, that it was all on me. – I believe I was a sophomore in college, and realized that to the college, I was just a number measured in GPA and how much I had to pay beyond what my scholarship paid for. Sure, I had friends at school, and I do know that several professors liked me, but I was on my own. Well, with the exception of student loans: for a long time, I didn’t think I could ever figure out how to repay them.
Sink or swim, it was up to me. It was a cold winter day. I was having a beer with my roommate. I remember looking at him and saying, “No one really cares about us, do they?” “Nope.”
Like I said, this was good news. I got to survive or thrive or fail based on my own efforts. This realization was a winner – my GPA actually went up afterwards, and it wasn’t all that horrible to begin with, though I hear the minimum GPA needed to go to USC is $500,000.00.
We are at that point in society as well. Many of the legacy institutions that were created by our forefathers are no longer in the business of serving actual American citizens who love freedom and have no idea how to have a complicated Starbucks™ order. Here’s a partial list:
• Immigration: Right now, ICE is on the side of the illegals streaming across the border. Not you. You can apply this to most government (both federal and big city) agencies. Disagree? Ask the January 6 Protestors if they think they got a fair deal from the DOJ and FBI. The only reason the FBI isn’t spelled KGB is because they don’t know Russian.
• Most Colleges: I can post academic after academic engaged in the vilest hate speech. Do they lose their jobs? Because it’s directed at you and me, which is okay and is covered under policy 364.3.d. But make a joke about a trans-GPA 4.0 student living in the body of a 2.0 student? That’s not allowed.
• The Military: The officers on the Right have been under attack since (at least) Obama. Good luck being promoted if you don’t agree with the Left. With things like illegal alien lesbian mom recruiting videos and mandatory Vaxxing, well, they’ve done their best to filter out people in the lower ranks, too. Thankfully the most reliable fighting force in the history of the United States is vaxxed illegal alien lesbians.
• Most Government Schools: Yesterday, read a story about a history teacher that marked a student incorrect on the question, “All men have a penis (T/F)”. Apparently, this is now indoctrination that is deemed worthy of history class where I recall spending a lot of time talking about George Washington’s penis. Oh, wait, I never heard the word penis a single time in history, except when my teacher was talking about FDR. Today? They’re not on our side.
• Mainstream News Media: Without the Internet, there would be very little division in the country because The Narrative is agreed to by almost all (including Fox™) news organizations. Without the Internet, there would be exactly one opinion, and it would be presented in crayon.
• Mainstream Entertainment: Why does Disney® make movies for kids that their parents find to be objectionable? Because their investors don’t care – they have an agenda that goes beyond making money.
I could keep going on and on, but my laptop is running out of ink, and you already know all of this. And, this is the good news: these institutions aren’t going to save us. They actively despise us and are doing everything they can to destroy us and erase us from memory. I mean, apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the people on the Right ever created?
Like I said, that’s the good news. Why? Because, just like I discovered in college, it should change everyone’s mindset. Our fate isn’t in their hands, but instead it’s in our hands. When I see people like Andrew Torba building out GAB™, I know that he’s out of the victim mentality, and is building a future that doesn’t depend on the Left. Vox Day is doing something similar with multiple initiatives, from his Arktoons® to Arkhaven Comics™ to Castalia House© (publishing) to Infogalactic© (Wikipedia® without the Leftist Overlords).
These institutions that people are actively creating show that they’re intent not on relying on the institutions that the Left has subverted, but instead on building their own. In truth, that’s the first step. The second is to make sure that the culture of each of these organizations that we’re creating is rooted in freedom and the ideology of the Right. Why? Because any institution that isn’t explicitly Right becomes Leftist over time, as John O’Sullivan’s First Law states. O’Sullivan cited the ACLU™, the Ford Foundation© and the Episcopal Church.
Why? Since Leftists aren’t good at creating much besides starvation and misery, they look to insinuate themselves into institutions that others have made. And they don’t do it in a good way, building something new – no, they’re like termites, gradually eating away at everything they find until they end up destroying what they’ve infiltrated. Then they blame those that built the institution they subverted in the first place for the failure.
Lather, rinse, repeat. No, it’s time we take the future into our own hands and build the structures that we need. Homeschooling is one bright example of how the Right has built something out of the ashes of public schools. We’re building our own social networks, our own entertainment. We don’t need the Left – or what they produce. There’s a bright future ahead once we realize that no one is coming to save us. All we have to do is make it."
Jim Kunstler, "Money for Nothing and Nothing for Money"
"Money for Nothing and Nothing for Money"
by Jim Kunstler
“Society lives and acts only in individuals… Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. ” - Ludwig von Mises
"Remember, you are a sovereign individual and the blob in our nation’s capital city is an undifferentiated mass of feckless protoplasm. You contain a cosmos of ideas and aspirations. The blob is an agglomeration of sham and failure. The blob stands for itself, not for our country. You and I can stand for our country.
Remember, also, that the economy of our country at its best was the sum of choices made by sovereign individuals, while the economy of the blob is a gelatinous buildup of unsound hypothesis having nothing to do with the pursuit of happiness. We sense this in the menacing rumors of a Federal Reserve digital currency, which entails the rehypothecation of our hopes and dreams into the blob’s waste-stream, turning everything we do - it can’t be put delicately - into shit.
The Fed digital currency will be used to cover-up the failure of end-state financialization of the economy. Finance, you understand, used to be a module of the economy, with a particular role to play. The purpose of finance, formerly, was to marshal surplus wealth from prior productive activity to make new productive activity possible. Financialization, however, does not do that. Financialization was an effort to replace the economy of real production with a hologram of production. Financialization is a racket - and a racket, remember, is an effort to get something for nothing, that is, dishonestly. The blob feeds and thrives on dishonesty, its favorite food.
Financialization seeks to replicate value not from wealth-producing activity but from things that only claim to represent wealth: stocks, bonds, currencies, and anything else that can pretend to hold value, clear up to notions and wishes. Its operations are based on “derivatives” because they aim to derive additional “wealth” from things that signify wealth, but which are not wealth itself. Each iteration of a derivative further abstracts its value from the real things originally signified, such as revenue-producing businesses, interest-bearing loans, leases, and contracts for delivery of commodities. Derivatives can be understood as false wealth, and when enough of them accumulate in a financialized economy, they will blow up the economy, spewing wreckage across an economic landscape.
Many observers of that landscape await such a blow up at any time now. They say it can take the form of a stock market crash, a bond market failure, bank shut-downs, and disorders in money (currencies). All of that can impoverish and immiserate a lot of people. We are living through a corrosive early phase of that now, the overture of a big blow up itself. The effects are felt keenly through the middle classes, who struggle in futility to pay their bills, keep their cars running, and feed their children.
The financialized economy was primed to blow up in September of 2019 when symptoms of severe distress materialized in an arcane corner of the system known as the reverse repo market where banks loan each other money on extremely short term, usually overnight, to provide so-called “liquidity” - meaning the appearance of solvency. The crisis expressed itself as a dangerously sharp rise in interest rates. The Fed came up with enough liquidity to paper over the crisis, and then, miraculous to relate, the Covid-19 “emergency” a few months later gave them cover to “print” trillions of dollars and distribute the “money” rapidly into the on-the-ground economy where people bought the things of daily life.
The result of that monetary mischief was today’s inflation. Inflation, of course, is one way of going broke. You have a lot of money that is increasingly worthless. The other way of going broke is deflation, where you have no money. In the aggregate of a deflation, nobody will have any money, so at least you’ll have company in the misery of being broke. My guess is that a grievous deflation is where the current situation is headed. Deflations are provoked when people and companies can’t meet their debt obligations - can’t “service” their loans (pay interest), or pay back contracted sums of borrowed money, or simply can’t pay their bills. Every loan that goes bad causes some money to disappear - poof! - and when a whole lot of that happens there is no money.
The Federal Reserve digital currency is a kind of last resort way around that. It is a simple way for the system to pretend there is a lot of money around when there really isn’t any. It has the huge additional advantages, by way of computerized accounting, to allow the authorities to control what everybody spends their money on, especially the ability to block the purchase of this or that: a train ticket, gasoline, meat, if the authorities feel like it. It also enables the authorities to extract taxes, duties, and penalties at will, without any cooperation from the citizen. A Fed digital currency would be a giant step into the worst kind of exquisitely targeted tyranny. The excuse, of course, would be a “national emergency.”
A digital currency would likely first be tested among the most indigent in society, those with little or no income. It already is, actually, in the debit cards currently issued to illegal border-jumpers. Their card accounts are refilled monthly, making this the equivalent of a guaranteed basic income. Next, this privilege will be extended to the lower economic ranks of American citizens, and so on upward, until the whole middle-class and even the higher levels are enlisted, and then the authorities will have the ability to push everyone around.
That’s the hypothesis, anyway. I don’t believe it’s going to work. The authorities have underestimated the number of citizens who know what it means to be sovereign individuals. They will decline to be pushed around. They might even push back, start stomping on the blob’s tentacles as it reaches across the land. The citizens of one region or another of our country might go so far as to establish their own money, which would make them sovereign regions of sovereign individuals. That is going to be a problem that the blob and blobism cannot overcome."
o
o
Dire Straits, "Money for Nothing"
"Crazy Things Going On At Walmart And Aldi! This Is Unreal!"
Adventures With Danno, AM 12/15/23
"Crazy Things Going On At Walmart
And Aldi! This Is Unreal!"
"We go over different things going on at Walmart and Aldi and some other stores. We also go over some online options that might be worth checking out for yourself."
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Prepare Yourself For An Inflationary Nightmare Situation, And There's No Stopping It!"
Gregory Mannarino, 12/15/23
"Prepare Yourself For An Inflationary Nightmare Situation,
And There's No Stopping It!"
https://traderschoice.net/
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"Honey Badgers"
"Honey Badgers"
Scott Ritter has humorously described the Yemeni Houthis as 'the honey badgers of the Middle East, absolutely fearless and relentlessly ferocious.' They just simply don't care. They've declared war on Israel while all the other Muslim states except Algeria just talk, and daily send missiles and drones to attack Israel. They totally control the 12 mile wide Bab-el-Mandab ("Gate of Grief") strait connecting the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, which transits 40% of the world's oil. Closing that would have catastrophic consequences on global economies, and the Houthis know it.
Full screen recommended.
Geopolitics TV, 12/15/23
"Yemen's Houthis Launch Missile Attack
On A Norwegian Tanker On Road To Israel!"
"Recently, the Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed responsibility for targeting a Norwegian commercial tanker named the STRINDA with a missile. This act was presented as a form of protest against Israel's ongoing military actions in Gaza. The Houthi military spokesperson, Yehia Sarea, explained that they attacked the STRINDA because it was reportedly involved in transporting crude oil to an Israeli terminal. According to their account, the crew of the tanker allegedly disregarded multiple warnings issued by the Houthi forces before the missile strike occurred."
Comments here:
o
And so it is...
Full screen recommended.
Wildacious, 12/15/23
"Honey Badger Takes Savagery to a Whole New Level"
"Honey badgers are the Italian mafia of the animal kingdom. No one, and I mean no one, wants to mess with these savages. They literally woke up and chose violence on the daily. They are regarded as the most fearless animal in the wild and they back that up every day, all while looking like a ferret on steroids.
Honey badgers woke up and chose violence. They'll combat anything from lions, leopards, hyenas and even cobras and pythons. But how did they become so fearless? How do these compact sized danger-weasels take on the deadliest predators like it was a regular Sunday’s brunch with the girls? These are moments of honey badgers being straight up savages. Let's get into it."
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Thursday, December 14, 2023
Jeremiah Babe, "Emergency Rate Cuts Won't Stop What's Coming; Historic Housing Correction"
Jeremiah Babe, 12/14/23
"Emergency Rate Cuts Won't Stop What's Coming;
Historic Housing Correction"
Comments here:
Canadian Prepper, "Everything Is About To Change, Right Now"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 12/14/23
"Everything Is About To Change, Right Now"
Comments here:
Musical Interlude: Peder B. Helland, "Deep Space"
Full screen recommended.
"Deep Space: Ambient Meditation
and Sleep Music from Soothing Relaxation"
"Deep ambient music for meditation and sleep composed by Peder B. Helland.
Turn the volume down and relax while you fly through space."
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"A Look to the Heavens"
“Large galaxies grow by eating small ones. Even our own galaxy practices galactic cannibalism, absorbing small galaxies that get too close and are captured by the Milky Way's gravity. In fact, the practice is common in the universe and illustrated by this striking pair of interacting galaxies from the banks of the southern constellation Eridanus, The River.
Located over 50 million light years away, the large, distorted spiral NGC 1532 is seen locked in a gravitational struggle with dwarf galaxy NGC 1531 (right of center), a struggle the smaller galaxy will eventually lose. Seen edge-on, spiral NGC 1532 spans about 100,000 light-years. Nicely detailed in this sharp image, the NGC 1532/1531 pair is thought to be similar to the well-studied system of face-on spiral and small companion known as M51.”
Chet Raymo, “Universal Constants, Universal Consensus”
“Universal Constants, Universal Consensus”
by Chet Raymo
“I once received a book in the mail, as I sometimes do, for potential review on this blog, James Stein's “Cosmic Numbers: The Numbers That Define Our Universe”. I often write here about books I read, but I don't review. I did glance at Stein's book, however. It has an audience, but it's not for me; been there, done that. The subtitle is provocative, however. The idea that a dozen or so numbers "define the universe." That's a mind-blowing concept.
The gravitational constant. The speed of light. Absolute zero. Planck's constant. The Hubble constant. And so on. Familiar to every introductory physics student. Built into the very structure of the Earth. And every other earth in the universe.
The gravitational constant. The speed of light. Absolute zero. Planck's constant. The Hubble constant. And so on. Familiar to every introductory physics student. Built into the very structure of the Earth. And every other earth in the universe.
Look again at the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photograph. above Those myriad of galaxies. Those yawning light-years. That infinitude of worlds. And, as far as we know, the fundamental constants are the same everywhere,
The human mind has thrown a net across the cosmos. And as we have brought the galaxies into our ken, so have we come to realize that we too are part and parcel of the fabric of cosmic space and time. Exceptional clarity. Impenetrable mystery.
So what do we make of the news so breathlessly reported in the media of neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light? This is surely a bit of heroic physics, pitting what we believe to be true against the refining fire of experience, but I wouldn't make too much of it yet. Tom suggested that perhaps the researchers unwittingly measured the distance from CERN in Switzerland to Gran Sasso in Italy with greater accuracy. That's the kind of whimsy the result calls for now. The real story- for the time being- is as an illustration of the way the engine of scientific knowing grinds inexorably toward consensus.”
The human mind has thrown a net across the cosmos. And as we have brought the galaxies into our ken, so have we come to realize that we too are part and parcel of the fabric of cosmic space and time. Exceptional clarity. Impenetrable mystery.
So what do we make of the news so breathlessly reported in the media of neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light? This is surely a bit of heroic physics, pitting what we believe to be true against the refining fire of experience, but I wouldn't make too much of it yet. Tom suggested that perhaps the researchers unwittingly measured the distance from CERN in Switzerland to Gran Sasso in Italy with greater accuracy. That's the kind of whimsy the result calls for now. The real story- for the time being- is as an illustration of the way the engine of scientific knowing grinds inexorably toward consensus.”
John Wilder, "The Jenga Economy"
"The Jenga Economy"
by John Wilder
“Out of these windows, we will view the collapse of
financial history. One step closer to economic equilibrium.”
– "Fight Club"
"After 9-11, sales of the Jenga® game really dropped. I’m not sure why, but in 2002 people had to play Jenga® the old-fashioned way – by stacking dishes in the sink.
But the game of Jenga™ is a pretty good analogy for our economy right now. Jenga© is based on taking one piece from the lower part of the structure and putting it on top. As the game progresses, everyone can see that the structure becomes weaker and more unstable. The game always (at our house) ends the same way: the tower, which now seems ridiculously tall, sways a little bit, becomes unbalanced, and topples. The pieces then go everywhere, and we leave them on the floor for the herds of stray free-range toddlers in our neighborhood to eat. We’re givers that way. The economy (to me) looks exactly like a game of Jenga™, seemingly impossibly stretched out and tall.
Examples? Well, let’s talk about when we turned money into cash. The dollar used to be bound to actual, physical commodities – gold and silver. I guess you could call it an either-ore situation. Gold was always the preferred, but people who wanted looser money (i.e., inflation) fought to get silver in there, too. In fact, silver was actually part of the money supply, making up a portion of many coins up until the 1960s when one Jenga© block was pulled and set on top.
Nixon pulled another when he ended the ability of foreign nations to bring piles of dollars and walk away with piles of gold. He made the tower even shakier as he threw gold out, entirely as a standard. The good news was that Americans could once again own gold. The bad news was that dollars were no longer money – they were cash – not backed by anything.
And could be printed at will. Another Jenga™ piece on top. The tower becomes a bit wobblier. And wobblier still as Nixon and Ford and Carter start printing. I mainly blame Nixon, since he got the ball going, and it took the hand of Reagan reaching out to steady the tower, though that created the very deep 1982 recession.
Reagan, though, added his bit as well. Sure, it made sense to try to spend the Russians into the ground – after the 1982 recession the economy came roaring back as The Wealth Pump started in earnest and the stock market soared. But during this time, the market cheered as jobs left the United States. In many cases, the jobs were subsidized by the country taking them. They wanted to build up the industrial expertise so that they could make world-class products and were willing to pay for their economy and workers to learn how to do it.
Remember George H. W. Bush’s advisors saying they didn’t care if the economy made computer chips or potato chips? Pepperidge Farms© remembers™. Because it does matter. Potato chips or computer chips don’t matter if you’re a banker making a loan, but if you’re trying to create the greatest value with the economy? It sure as hell does matter.
On the government side, fiscal responsibility seemed to come back for a bit with Bill Clinton. Now, don’t thank Bill – it was entirely based on Newt Gingrich stopping all the nonsense for a few years that primed the pump of the economy. While Hillary is an ideologue, Bill was always in it for the hot chicks. Sure, there were shenanigans, but the Jenga™ players were mostly playing it safe during that time period.
But when the recession hit in 2000? George W. Bush really wanted to open the floodgates, so he started stacking as high and as fast as he could. War helped him move a few Jenga™ pieces, and low interest rates in his “everyone who breathes should own a McMansion” policy fueled an amazing set of bubbles that ended up including housing, natural gas, crude oil, and what was left of my hair.
The path out of the Great Recession was a simple one. Print more money. People aren’t buying United States Bonds? Heck, the Fed® can buy them now. We can also pay Wall Street to launder all the bad debt and make sure that irresponsible bank vaults get filled to the top with cash. Because, why not?
Obama took some Jenga™ pieces from the very bottom and put them up top because he wanted to get health care into the system.
Trump didn’t add too many blocks to the top of the board, at first. Trump was mainly because he was focused on deals – immigration, trade, covfefe. But he couldn’t make a deal with COVID. His instincts were bad and his solution was just to stack more blocks up top by printing money and cramming it down people’s throats as fast as he could.
Biden doubled down on that strategy: importing illegals by the truckload to paper over the economy that no longer serves its citizens, spending billions to “reduce inflation” and now nobody wants to buy the bonds. Thankfully, the banks are scrambling to create weird new structures so they can pretend that the loan that they made at 4% isn’t costing them when they’re giving 5.5% on CDs.
The tower is now, really, really tall. And really, really shaky. And these things never end slowly – they end either with mass social unrest, a big war, or both when the tower finally collapses. And others have just given up."
"Psychopaths: 'Intra-species Predators'"
"Psychopaths: 'Intra-species Predators'"
by Various Authors
A comment: Sometimes what’s happening in this world seems nearly indescribably insane. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, “Once you’ve eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Wars, economic crises, fiscal madness, none of these things just happen spontaneously, all by themselves. Perhaps there is a logical explanation. It would explain much... - CP
•
"Study: Psychopaths Have 'Potholed' Brains"
by Kate Kelland, Reuters/ABC Science
"Psychopaths have faulty connections between the part of the brain dealing with emotions and that which handles impulses and decision-making, scientists have found. In a study of psychopaths who had committed murder, manslaughter, multiple rape, strangulation and false imprisonment, the British scientists found that roads linking the two crucial brain areas had "potholes", while those of non-psychopaths were in good shape.
The study opens up the possibility of developing treatments for dangerous psychopaths in the future, says Dr Michael Craig of the Institute of Psychiatry at London's King's College Hospital, and may have profound implications for doctors, researchers and the criminal justice system. "These were particular serious offenders with psychopathy and without any other mental illnesses," he says. "Essentially what we found is that the connections in the psychopaths were not as good as the connections in the non-psychopaths. I would describe them as roads between the two areas, and we found that in the psychopaths, the roads had potholes and weren't very well maintained."
Timing is key: The scientists caution against suggestions the study could lead to screening of potential psychopathic criminals before they are able to commit crimes, saying their findings had not established how, when or why the brain links were damaged. Psychopathic extremes have been portrayed in Hollywood blockbusters by characters like the serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter. They often violate social norms, are manipulative, impulsive and sensation-seeking, and appear to feel no empathy or remorse.
Craig, who is lead author of the study, published in the journal "Molecular Psychiatry," stresses that the number of brain scans in the study was small, with only nine psychopaths analyzed compared to nine non-psychopaths. "Trying to get people of this particular type to take part in a study, and also then deal with all the security you need to get them into a brain scanner, is not an easy feat," he says.
The study used a new brain imaging technology to further analyze psychopaths' brains after previous studies found that the amygdala part of the brain, which processes emotions, and orbitofrontal cortex, which handles impulses and decisions, are structurally and functionally different in psychopaths. "Up until recently the technology hasn't been available to look at the connections between those two brain areas in any meaningful way," says Craig. But a new technique, called diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DT-MRI), allows the researchers to look at the white matter tract linking the two key brain areas.
As well as finding clear structural deficits in the tract in psychopathic brains, they also found the degree of abnormality was significantly linked to the degree of psychopathy. "As for the moral significance for society, and how society wants to deal with these things, that is a little premature," says Craig. "This is a small study and the important thing it raises is that more research needs to be done."
- http://www.sott.net/
•
"Understanding Psychopaths"
by Paul Wilson, ABC Science
"Psychopaths are usually egocentric and often experience little guilt or remorse for their actions. The successful TV series "Dexter," based on Jeff Lindsay's novels of the same name, followed Dexter Morgan, a forensic blood spatter expert for the Miami Dade Police Department. He hunted down people who have escaped justice and then killed them. Quirky, charming but often murderously violent Dexter's character oscillated between normality and controlled psychopathic fury. But does Dexter represent the typical psychopathic serial killer? For that matter do psychopaths really exist or are they, as some psychologists believe, simply a media and writers' beat-up, a condition that has never been scientifically established?
While I am skeptical about many psychological categorizations and believe that it is always difficult to pigeon-hole humans into neat diagnostic packages, there is a great deal of evidence that psychopaths really do exist. More surprising to many is that violent serial killers - such as Ted Bundy, Australian child killer Derek Percy or even fiction's Dexter - are not necessarily stereotypical psychopaths.
While many psychopaths are violent criminals, others prefer to stay within the bounds of the law and achieve their career or interpersonal aspirations by manipulation and intimidation. Indeed, there is an increasing amount of evidence that corrupt politicians and businessmen, unethical lawyers, some radical activists and many others who may have reached positions of authority or power have psychopathic personalities. And these are the psychopaths we are more likely to encounter or be affected by in our lives.
What is a psychopath? Although there are many evidence-based psychological tests to measure psychopathy, the most well researched is undoubtedly Robert Hare's psychopathy checklist which is used extensively around the world. Hare describes psychopaths as "intra-species predators" who use charm, manipulation and/or violence to satisfy their own selfish needs. Lacking in conscience or real feelings they take what they want regardless of the consequences to others. In pursuing their goals they are likely to be cool under pressure, calm, emotionally flat and lacking in feeling. And by these criteria, Dexter is indeed a quintessential psychopath. The general consensus is that psychopaths don't change over time, although the number of their criminal acts might well reduce with age. However, most experts believe that they remain thoroughly unpleasant individuals throughout their life.
Psychopathy is a socially destructive personality disorder usually characterized by a combination of emotional, interpersonal and behavioral traits. The most common of these are egocentricity, extreme impulsivity coupled with irresponsible behavior, pathological lying and a lack of guilt or remorse. The condition is not a defined mental illness - both legally and in a psychiatric sense psychopaths are generally declared sane, although there is some evidence that a combined diagnosis of schizophrenia and psychopathy occurs occasionally.
Psychopathy and crime: While psychopaths comprise around six per cent of the general population, it's estimated that between 15 and 25 per cent of the American male prison population and seven to 15 per cent of female prisoners are psychopaths. The figures for Australian prisons are thought to be lower, although no one knows for sure.
The crimes of psychopaths are not confined to violent predatory behavior. Embezzlement, major fraud and many other "white collar" offenses are also committed by psychopaths. But often the psychopaths who make headlines are the ones that represent the most violent and dangerous criminals. Those who commit child abduction and murder are very often sexual psychopaths, sadists who delight in inflicting emotional and physical pain on their victims. These men - and occasional woman - are driven by their wild and dangerously out-of-control fantasies that include acting out visions of domination, pain, humiliation and sexual perversion. It is often said that the people who commit these kinds of crimes lack empathy - the ability to identify with how other people feel. But I believe that this view distorts how psychopaths actually feel. [Comment: This is the author's opinion of course, but do Psychopaths actually 'feel' anything for other people?]
Violent sexual psychopaths have an urgent and intense desire to inflict pain and suffering and do actually identify with how their victims feel. Indeed, the more pain and suffering their victims suffer, the more pleasure they obtain - they identify with the pain, they simply do not care about the physical and psychological anguish that they cause.
Causes of psychopathy: A great deal of debate has occurred as to the origins of psychopathy - much of it a classic nature versus nurture argument. Many psychopaths have had appalling childhoods punctuated by parental, sexual or physical abuse by one or both parents. Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and many of Australia's and the world's worst serial killers have childhoods marked by these events, often reinforced by horrendous abuse in child or juvenile institutions for young offenders or those taken into care. However, these environments cannot by themselves explain why men and women become violent predators or psychopaths - if only because hundreds of thousands of children all over the world have similar upbringings and never commit any crime or develop psychopathy.
On the 'nature' side of the argument, there is some evidence of physiological differences in the brains of psychopaths. Preliminary neurophysiological research suggests that psychopaths fail to appreciate the emotional importance of events and that this may be related to brain dysfunction especially in the frontal cortex, the area of the brain that is responsible for processing emotions. More recent research has emphasized psychopathy as essentially a learning disability. For example Joseph Newman's work categories the way that psychopaths think as an information processing problem that makes psychopaths oblivious to the implications of their actions when focused on tasks that promise instant rewards. Clearly we are far from understanding the causes of this condition.
The future: We still have a lot to learn about the origins of psychopathy and how it manifests itself across cultures. A great deal of research is currently being conducted on the neurophysiological, psychological and social roots of psychopathy and how each may interact with each other. And in an exciting trend, researchers are increasingly focusing on community studies of psychopaths, rather than just confining their studies to the extreme sub-populations within prisons. This research is critical because few who have worked in this field doubt the enormous destructive power of the psychopathic personality, a personality that seems resilient to any known therapy or intervention."
Professor Paul Wilson, a forensic psychologist and criminologist at Bond University, was one of the guest speakers when ABC Science's Bernie Hobbs hosted "Café Scientific: The Science of Psychopaths in Storytelling" at the Brisbane Writers Festival. His most recent book, written with Amanda Howard, is "Predators: Killers without Conscience," published in Australia by New Holland."
- http://www.sott.net/
"The Sociopath Next Door"
"The Sociopath Next Door"
by Martha Stout
‧
‧
"Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools.
Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition. In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.
You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered. How will you live your life? What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)? The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people - whether they have a conscience or not - favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent people and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites. Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.
Maybe you are someone who craves money and power, and though you have no vestige of conscience, you do have a magnificent IQ. You have the driving nature and the intellectual capacity to pursue tremendous wealth and influence, and you are in no way moved by the nagging voice of conscience that prevents other people from doing everything and anything they have to do to succeed. You choose business, politics, the law, banking or international development, or any of a broad array of other power professions, and you pursue your career with a cold passion that tolerates none of the usual moral or legal encumbrances. When it is expedient, you doctor the accounting and shred the evidence, you stab your employees and your clients (or your constituency) in the back, marry for money, tell lethal premeditated lies to people who trust you, attempt to ruin colleagues who are powerful or eloquent, and simply steamroll over groups who are dependent and voiceless. And all of this you do with the exquisite freedom that results from having no conscience whatsoever.
You become unimaginably, unassailably, and maybe even globally successful. Why not? With your big brain, and no conscience to rein in your schemes, you can do anything at all. If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction. Crazy and frightening - and real, in about 6 percent of the population.
The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 6 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.
Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psychopathy - murderers, serial killers, mass murderers - people who have conspicuously broken the law many times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death by our legal system. We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger number of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system provides little defense.
Most of us would not imagine any correspondence between conceiving an ethnic genocide and, say, guiltlessly lying to one's boss about a coworker. But the psychological correspondence is not only there; it is chilling. Simple and profound, the link is the absence of the inner mechanism that beats up on us, emotionally speaking, when we make a choice we view as immoral, unethical, neglectful, or selfish. Most of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person. Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers.
The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender. What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron - or what makes the difference between an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer - is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity. What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions."
Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience, that they seldom even guess at your condition. In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world.
You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences will most likely remain undiscovered. How will you live your life? What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)? The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people - whether they have a conscience or not - favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent people and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites. Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all.
Maybe you are someone who craves money and power, and though you have no vestige of conscience, you do have a magnificent IQ. You have the driving nature and the intellectual capacity to pursue tremendous wealth and influence, and you are in no way moved by the nagging voice of conscience that prevents other people from doing everything and anything they have to do to succeed. You choose business, politics, the law, banking or international development, or any of a broad array of other power professions, and you pursue your career with a cold passion that tolerates none of the usual moral or legal encumbrances. When it is expedient, you doctor the accounting and shred the evidence, you stab your employees and your clients (or your constituency) in the back, marry for money, tell lethal premeditated lies to people who trust you, attempt to ruin colleagues who are powerful or eloquent, and simply steamroll over groups who are dependent and voiceless. And all of this you do with the exquisite freedom that results from having no conscience whatsoever.
You become unimaginably, unassailably, and maybe even globally successful. Why not? With your big brain, and no conscience to rein in your schemes, you can do anything at all. If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction. Crazy and frightening - and real, in about 6 percent of the population.
The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of us who must live on this planet, too, even those of us who have not been clinically traumatized. The individuals who constitute this 6 percent drain our relationships, our bank accounts, our accomplishments, our self-esteem, our very peace on earth.
Yet surprisingly, many people know nothing about this disorder, or if they do, they think only in terms of violent psychopathy - murderers, serial killers, mass murderers - people who have conspicuously broken the law many times over, and who, if caught, will be imprisoned, maybe even put to death by our legal system. We are not commonly aware of, nor do we usually identify, the larger number of nonviolent sociopaths among us, people who often are not blatant lawbreakers, and against whom our formal legal system provides little defense.
Most of us would not imagine any correspondence between conceiving an ethnic genocide and, say, guiltlessly lying to one's boss about a coworker. But the psychological correspondence is not only there; it is chilling. Simple and profound, the link is the absence of the inner mechanism that beats up on us, emotionally speaking, when we make a choice we view as immoral, unethical, neglectful, or selfish. Most of us feel mildly guilty if we eat the last piece of cake in the kitchen, let alone what we would feel if we intentionally and methodically set about to hurt another person. Those who have no conscience at all are a group unto themselves, whether they be homicidal tyrants or merely ruthless social snipers.
The presence or absence of conscience is a deep human division, arguably more significant than intelligence, race, or even gender. What differentiates a sociopath who lives off the labors of others from one who occasionally robs convenience stores, or from one who is a contemporary robber baron - or what makes the difference between an ordinary bully and a sociopathic murderer - is nothing more than social status, drive, intellect, blood lust, or simple opportunity. What distinguishes all of these people from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions."
The Poet: Maya Angelou, "A Brave And Startling Truth"
"A Brave And Startling Truth"
by Maya Angelou
"We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space,
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns,
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we discover
A brave and startling truth.
And when we come to it,
To the day of peacemaking,
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms.
When we come to it,
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate,
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean.
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass,
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil.
When the rapacious storming of the churches,
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased.
When the pennants are waving gaily,
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze.
When we come to it,
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders,
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce.
When land mines of death have been removed,
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace.
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh,
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse.
When we come to it,
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory,
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets.
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun.
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world.
When we come to it,
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe,
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace.
We, this people on this mote of matter,
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence,
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor,
And the body is quieted into awe.
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet,
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living.
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow,
And the proud back is glad to bend.
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines.
When we come to it,
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body,
Created on this earth, of this earth,
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety,
Without crippling fear.
When we come to it,
We must confess that we are the possible,
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world.
That is when, and only when,
We come to it."
○
"World War III Prelude, 12/14/23"
Full screen recommended.
OpenmindedThinker Show, 12/14/23
"Multiple Explosions Rock Israel;
Tel Aviv, Ashdod, and Ashkelon Hit"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Hindustan Times, 12/14/23
"'Gaza Situation Catastrophic': Putin Blasts
Israel's War; Reiterates Support To Palestinian Cause"
"Russian President Vladimir Putin has once again backed Palestinian cause of independence and said that the situation in Gaza is catastrophic which has no comparison with Ukraine where Russia has waged a war since February 2022. Putin has been highly critical of Israel's war on Gaza and called on Tel Aviv to cease its actions following Hamas' assault on Israel on October 7."
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 12/14/23
"US Will Attack Iran To Divert Attention From Ukraine"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Douglas Macgregor, 12/14/23
"Israel's Attacks On Gaza - Innocent Civilians In War"
Comments here:
o
Full screen recommended.
Scott Ritter, 12/14/23
"Hezbollah Will Shock The World
With the Absolute Destruction Of Israel"
Comments here:
Dan, I Allegedly, "Fees to Use Cash? The Shocking New Proposal"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly 12/14/23
"Fees to Use Cash? The Shocking New Proposal"
"Imagine getting charged to use cash at a business?
This is the proposal that is in the works."
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